You see, Mark doesn’t distract us with stories about Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem; he leaves out the stable, the angels and shepherds and kings. Instead, Mark’s story starts in the wilderness, on the banks of the Jordan River, in the place of New Beginnings, where God first led the people of Israel into the Promised Land. And then, at the end of Mark’s Gospel, Mark clearly repeats the same pattern that he described at Jesus’ baptism: Instead of receiving the Spirit, Jesus breathes out his spirit. Instead of the heavens being ripped open, the curtain of the Temple is torn in two. And instead of the voice from heaven naming Jesus as God’s Son, it’s the Roman Centurion who proclaims Jesus the true Son of God. In placing his Gospel between two events that mirror each other, Mark makes it clear that Jesus’ baptism points to his death on the Cross, and his death on the Cross echoes his baptism. When Jesus wades into the Jordan, he’s already taking his first steps on the path toward his death.
It’s a strange, dangerous Love, then, that God pours out upon his Son at his baptism. Our cute little silver shells of warm water, spooned gingerly over babies’ foreheads, unfortunately no longer make clear to us the kind of love—and the kind of life--that we’re really being baptized into as Christians. But it was different for Christians in the first centuries of the faith. They entered the chilly waters of deep baptismal pools, built over springs of running water in dank, dark caves. Stripped naked, they were dunked completely underwater by the priests, Southern Baptist style. As they emerged choking, spluttering, and blue with cold from an experience much like drowning, they were clothed right then and there in new white garments, wrapped in a new life in Christ. It must indeed have been a very dramatic—even frightening--sacrament. While we don’t baptize like that anymore here at St. Ambrose, our baptism, too, is still an entrance into Christ’s death, as well as into his Resurrection.
No one puts her finger on the dangers of baptism better than author Flannery O’Connor. In her short story, “The River,” O’Connor tells us about a little boy in desperate need of love. Only about 4 or 5 years old, he already lives in a gray, flat world of despair, neglected by his parents, pawned off on a series of babysitters who ignore him. O’Connor describes the boy as plodding dully through life “mute and patient, like an old sheep waiting to be let out.”[2] He only knows the names of God and Jesus as curse words, until one of his sitters takes him with her to a revival meeting down at the river. There, the itinerant preacher speaks with passion about “the River of Life, made out of Jesus’ Blood.”
The preacher intones, “All the rivers come from that one River and go back to it like it was the ocean sea and if you believe, you can lay your pain in that River and get rid of it. It’s a River full of pain itself, pain itself, moving toward the Kingdom of Christ, to be washed away, slow, you people, slow as this here old red water river round my feet.”[3]
Pushed toward the preacher by his zealous babysitter, the little boy suddenly realizes that what’s happening at this river is serious stuff, unlike anything he has ever known before. “Where he lived, everything was a joke” writes O’Connor. “[But] From the preacher’s face, he knew immediately that nothing the preacher said or did was a joke.”[4]
And then, the preacher speaks to him the magic words, the words that we all long to hear in our desperate searches for approval in this world: If you are baptized, promises the preacher, “You won’t be the same again … You’ll count.” That’s what we all want, isn’t it, to count? To be someone in someone else’s eyes, to be recognized as the child of God that we are, to have a meaningful place in this world?
Grabbing the little boy and shoving him under the water, the preacher proclaims the truth triumphantly, “You count now … You didn’t even count before.”
Like Jesus and like us, the little boy in O’Connor’s story doesn’t get to remain long in the triumphant moment of baptism. He’s returned to the wilderness of his uncaring parents, to his boring, meaningless life, to a world where everything is a joke. But having tasted God’s powerful love, the love that makes him count, the little boy is drawn back to the river. Thinking about the river, “his expression changed as if he were gradually seeing appear what he didn’t know he’d been looking for. Then all of a sudden he knew what he wanted to do.”[5]
Not waiting around for God or the Church, he goes to the river to baptize himself one more time, to find the Kingdom of Christ hidden down in the River. Gasping and sputtering in the water that’s slowly rising around his neck, the boy keeps floating; he keeps being pushed back to shore by the waves. Despairing that he has misunderstood, that God doesn’t really want him, either, the boy fights and kicks at the water, until the current catches him and “like a long gentle hand” pulls him under and away.
God’s love is a love that we must drown in, O’Connor seems to say. We must drown in it in order to re-emerge into the resurrected life, into the life where we “count.”
In hard times, it’s easy to feel that we don’t count. When our jobs are threatened, we doubt ourselves and our futures. When we have to move to a new place, or when disease or age diminishes who we think we are, when relationships end and we find ourselves alone … we need extra affirmation. In those moments, we’re more open to risking the wild currents of the Divine Life.
Yet, when we’re feeling cozy and confident in our familiar pews, and all seems right with the world, it’s tempting to forget the all-demanding divine love that laps dangerously at our toes. We’re afraid of what it might do to us, wary of how it might change us. We’re caught between our desperate desire for love and our insistence that we don’t need to change. So, we comfy Christians, we sometimes hang back, proclaiming that we don’t need to be dunked under the water of Love; we don’t need to be choked and battered by waves that escape our control. We claim, along with another of O’Connor’s characters, that, “What I can see and do for myself and my fellowman in this life is all of my portion and I’m content with it.”[6]
I wonder: How we who have been baptized continue to participate in the turbulent Spirit-life into which we have been reborn, into which we are invited by our crucified Lord? We might think we’re sitting safely on the shore. But God has marked our hearts with a cross in our baptisms, too. When the chrism is placed on the foreheads of the newly baptized in the sign of the cross, they are “sealed as Christ’s own forever.” You are God’s Beloved, no matter what, forever and ever. You count. And so do each one of our siblings in Christ. We are “one Body and one Spirit. One hope in God’s call to us.” [7] Together, we are the Body of Christ, dead to the old, and risen to new life. There’s no sitting apart in safe self-sufficiency. We will drown and rise together in the terrible, invincible Love of God.
[1] According to Eugene Boring, in his commentary on Mark’s Gospel.
[2] Flannery O’Connor, “The River,” in Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works (New York: Library Classics of the United States, 1988), 155.
[3] Ibid., 162.
[4] Ibid., 165.
[5] Ibid., 169.
[6] O’Connor, The Violent Bear It Away, 172.
